Mike Carter's Blog for Wine Packaging, Design & Marketing Insights

Champagne House To Test Metal Closures

May 2, 2009

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Over the past few years the wine world has gotten accustomed to the idea that screwtop doesn’t mean poor quality. Now could the champagne cork be replaced by a metal cap too? Duval-Leroy is planning to start selling bottles with aluminium tops later this year. The company will start off using the new metal cap on a few bottles of Duval-Leroy’s clos des Bouveries to see if the world is ready for champagne without popping a cork. The new cap was designed to deal with the intense pressure that builds up inside a champagne bottle. Canadian company Alcan Packaging won’t reveal the new top until it is officially launched next month.

The move alarms traditionalists and indeed anyone for whom that distinctive sound, the hard pop followed by the soft fizz of bubbles, evokes a Pavlovian response. In the Telegraph, Chrystele Ivins, a spokesperson for Alcan in Paris, promises that the new top will still make a pop sound and that it will be easy to open. That at least is welcome news for anyone who has ever wrestled with a cork or had a dangerous misfire. The success of the new closure however will rely less on the utility of it and more on public reaction.